When Nina returns home, Erica never addresses Lily and says nothing like "Get the hell out of my house".
There's a nifty camera trick with a mirror that seems to merge the image of Nina and Lily together, shortly after Nina's mother confronts her after they enter the apartment. This is the hint to us that they are the same.
- This appears to be the most straightforward interpretation of the scene, considering that Nina's hallucinations are moving into full swing by this part of the film. Also, when Lily denies that she stayed the night, Nina seems more embarrassed at having had a sexual dream about Lily than confused and angry at Lily for lying.
- Considering how sexually repressed Nina is, how her first masturbation scene went, and how Lily embodies the darker, edgier, and seductive Black Swan that Nina so desperately wants to become, it's extremely likely that Lily was telling the truth and Nina hallucinated the sex scene. Particularly since Nina's mother never acknowledges that another person is in the apartment.
- While all the above points are completely valid, it really needs to be said that ecstasy does not make you hallucinate. It may make you energetic and receptive to new sensations, and you might lose track of time and space, but it will not make you start seeing people who aren't there. That was all Nina's doing.
WMG because Lily specifically denies it.
- Lily could have denied it because she was simply a closet case.
Which would mean that this movie has the same Aesop as RFAD: Don't do drugs!
- This could also be supported by the appearance of Uncle Hank (A.K.A the ASS TO ASS! guy from Requiem) making creepy kissy faces at Nina in the subway.
- Well I forgot about the other things, but she did steal the lipstick.
- Considering Nina's state of mind, I don't think it's out of the question that she herself called in sick then went back to bed, and didn't remember it.
- This makes a lot of sense when you realize that both Nina and the Swan Queen commit suicide at the end of the performance, the Swan Queen because she's so traumatized and Nina because it's the only way for her to be "perfect".
- Or perhaps she DID stab herself, but it wasn't nearly as bad as she imagined it to be. After all, the blood didn't actually start to spread dramatically until she was up on the cliff as Odette, about to die. It could have been an exaggeration in her mind of how bad her injury really was.
- Or the glass was acting the a pressure barrier limiting the bleeding. Like how in the event of an actual stabbing your not supposed to remove the blade?
- That's true, she did manage to dance the entire second act of Swan Lake without passing out or dying. Plus the glass didn't look like it was that far in.
- There's also the fact that she has to change into her Black Swan costume after the initial stabbing, and then change back into her White Swan costume. The hole that she takes the mirror shard out of is just too perfectly over the wound to be real, I think.
- Confirmed by Word of God.
- Or perhaps she DID stab herself, but it wasn't nearly as bad as she imagined it to be. After all, the blood didn't actually start to spread dramatically until she was up on the cliff as Odette, about to die. It could have been an exaggeration in her mind of how bad her injury really was.
This is the story of an American scientist, Nina, trying to build her dream persona - and she manifests as a ballet dancer, because she loves ballet, and always wanted to dance ballet as a child, but she's a stiff, methodical, regulated one because she's become used to living a methodical scientist's life. But to Thomas (a more experienced dream enterer, a scientist who dreams he's a Frenchman for reasons yet undisclosed to the general public), that's not enough. Nina's got to fully connect with her Id for her to be successful, in his view. So it's a shared dream between the two of them - with possibly a couple of other people, but the point is, everyone in the film who's trying to hurt Nina actually is, because they're Projections of Thomas's subconscious.
The problem is, Thomas has gotten too much in touch with his own Id. As he's in control of the dream, he also is lusting after Nina, and Nina is having difficulty handling her own sexual desires/problems. As the dream progresses and gets out of hand, Nina is forced to confront her own childhood traumas and sexual repression, and finally - in an inadvertent gesture that only makes sense to Oscar Wilde - she finds a way to die in the dream. She dances a perfect, amazing Black Swan, and then dies, waking up, leaving Thomas and his sick world behind.
The Malkavian was part of the ensemble and really wanted Nina's part, so started throwing down some heavy Dementation on her. This backfired spectacularly, as it only made Nina more determined to play the Black Swan. Come to think of it, do we ever see Lily in direct sunlight?
After the scene is over, you see her holding on to a bloody file. She couldn't deal with the idea that her idol wasn't perfect, so she snapped.
Beth was a famous ballerina who got into a car accident and received a permanent injury on her leg. Her career is ruined and she has no one to blame but herself, so she invented the story of a girl named Nina Sayers who honed in on her territory- just so she'd have someone to be mad at... Nina never existed.
Before Lily made the trek from San Francisco to New York, she did some extra research on the other soloists (easy enough in this day and age) to see who is her biggest competition. She knew that Nina was probably it, and upon arriving, discovered that she was going to be easier to break than she thought. Lily interrupted Nina's audition on purpose, was the one who wrote "Whore" on the bathroom wall and was lying about not spending the night with Nina, etc. None of this was to drive Nina to suicide or anything, but it was just to get her stressed out enough to make major mistakes, miss performances, etc. Listen to how Lily cries out "She was supposed to be sick!" when Nina shows up at the performance after all. Things did not go according to plan. However, Lily is genuine when she offers her congratulations during Nina's performance, and when she sees Nina's injuries at the end, she is horrified that her ruse went so far.
- That wasn't Lily. That was Veronica, who was the girl Nina originally congratulated for winning the part. She was likely Nina's lead understudy and her true rival for the part.
- You mean it wasn't Lily who cried out "She was supposed to be sick!"? Yes, it was - Lily was made Nina's alternate.
- That's what I thought as well. Also, it looked to me like most of Lily's crazy/nasty/psycho moments were Nina's paranoia; I didn't think she was at any point trying to steal the role.
- You mean the part where it shows Nina completely normal and that the shadowing was only a visual effect for the audience of the ballet and that she was hallucinating becoming a swan?
- This one's too good not to be intentional. Nina steals the red lipstick from Beth only a few scenes before, and then we see her decide to wear it when she goes to ask Thomas for the part. Thomas kisses her, she gets the part, and she feels like a whore. Later, she enters the bathroom alone so she can call her mother, and perhaps sees the lipstick in her handbag when reaching for her phone. She's reminded that she'd wore it with the intent of influencing Thomas and labels her reflection accordingly. Also note that Nina very briefly glances at the mirror just before making the call.
- Interestingly, the "Making Of" seems to support this - Darren Aronofsky had Natalie Portman herself write the word "Whore" with the lipstick, rather than just have a set dresser or crew member do it.
The girl then meets a prince (or a king, or even Leroy !), who is seduced by the white swan, but ends with the eponymous black swan, while the girl kills herself.
Here one of the creative touches of the movie is on the casting of the black swan. In the beginning, all lead to think it's Lily (Nina's darker twin in many ways, and she even sleeps with the prince... maybe), but it seems to actually be Dark!Nina herself, who takes a kiss from Thomas in the end.
I wish a troper could find a place for Beth in that theory, though.Also, it prevents me from being bugged by the fact that Leroy's take on the Swan Lake is not that much original...
- What are those? I feel like having a pretty generic version of Swan Lake is one of those.
- Then why is Thomas having sex with her?
- Wasn't Lily having sex with one of the dancers in the troupe and Nina simply imagined it to be Thomas? This troper thought the scene where she sees Lily caressing the dancer later during the show is where Nina realizes that she hallucinated it to be Thomas. It's just before she realizes that she hallucinated the entire fight with Lily in the dressing room and actually stabbed herself, if this troper's not mistaken.
- It may work on a similar principle to Fight Club?
- Wasn't Lily having sex with one of the dancers in the troupe and Nina simply imagined it to be Thomas? This troper thought the scene where she sees Lily caressing the dancer later during the show is where Nina realizes that she hallucinated it to be Thomas. It's just before she realizes that she hallucinated the entire fight with Lily in the dressing room and actually stabbed herself, if this troper's not mistaken.
- Nina just imagined it? Hell, with all the Mind Screw in the film...
- Also, I don't know if I believe Lily doesn't exist, but it's entirely possible.
- Maybe he was actually having sex with Nina.
- There are plenty of clues that point to this idea, including, but not limited to the following:
- Lily is first (officially) introduced when Nina is first asked to dance the black swan (during her audition).
- Despite his interest in doing a radically different version of Swan Lake and his conviction that Nina and Lily perfectly embody Odette and Odille respectively, the director never considers splitting the role in two, which is commonly done.
- When Lily just randomly shows up at Nina's apartment, Nina doesn't know how Lily knew where she lived, and Lily's coy about it.
- When Lily comes to the door, Erica insists that "it's nobody"; when they seem to return together, we only see Lily in reflection shots; Erica and Lily never interact.
- Nina taunts her mother with the idea that she slept with two men at the club (Tom and "Jerry") — but we only see Nina with one guy and are later told that Lily went home with the other.
- Lily is seemingly never reprimanded for anything, including arriving late, disrupting a rehearsal, and refusing warm-up exercises. When Lily startles Nina causing her to stumble during her audition, the director blames only Nina and refuses to let her start again. Further, when Lily tells the director to go easy on Nina, he gets angry at Nina, as though Nina had asked him this.
- Lily's tattoo is somewhat improbable for a soloist in the New York City Ballet.
- Lily's interest in Nina is one-sided and out of nowhere; we never see a real friendship between them, only Lily showing up and dragging Nina into various questionable activities.
- Like Erica, the director also refers to Lily as "nobody" at one point in the film ("Nobody's trying to steal your role").
- The director's obsessive interest in bringing out the black swan in Nina would make more sense if he'd actually seen some Black Swan potential in Nina's dancing; if Lily's actions are actually Nina's, then it would imply Nina's Black Swan is frustratingly inconsistent, not flat out hopeless.
- When Nina arrives late and Lily appears to be filling in for her, Thomas makes no attempt to verbally acknowledge that this is going on, and when Nina does, he looks completely confused as to what she's talking about.
- Lily is cast as Nina's understudy improbably late into the production. Veronica was the actual understudy from the beginning.
Nina is in constant conflict with her superego, who says she should always remain in control, and her id, who says she should give in to her carnal desires. The superego in the movie is her mom, and the id is Lily. Nina is afraid that Lily, who is more in touch with her base instincts, is better at the role of the Black Swan, which is all about the id. That's why she externalizes her own id to Lily, imagining having sex with her, and fears Lily is trying to steal the role of the Black Swan from her. The mother, on the other hand, is constantly trying to control Nina, and in the end, she even tries to stop her from playing the Swan Princess because she thinks Nina is losing her mind due to her role. The mother, therefore, is the superego, always keeping Nina in control and not letting her lose herself to her instincts. Because Nina has externalized both her superego and her id, she cannot grow up. She remains a little girl who can't take control of her own life or become a sexual being; that is, she cannot become an adult woman.
In order to grow up, Nina needs to accept her superego and id as internal to her and symbolically "kill" their external representations. She first does this to the mother, attacking her and saying she is moving out. (Significantly, she attacks her hands. The mother in the movie is sort of a puppetmaster, and she uses her hands to paint pictures of Nina, thus recreating Nina in the way she wants her to be. Breaking the mother's fingers is a symbolic attack against her control.) Then she does it to Lily, stabbing her. Only after she has done these things can she fully become the Swan Princess. It's important to notice that after Nina has stopped externalizing parts of her own psyche to other people, the mother and Lily are no longer her "enemies". Lily comes to Nina's room to praise her performance as the Black Swan (the role Nina feared she would steal from her), and her mother is seen in the audience, looking ecstatically at Nina's performance of the role she previously feared would consume her daughter. This means Nina's superego and id have become part of her, and they're not represented by other people anymore. She has finally become a grown-up woman, and this is symbolized by the blood on her dress, resembling menstrual blood. Nina doesn't die at the end of the movie but is reborn as a mature human being, as someone who can reconcile her need for control and desire to let it go.
- Or alternatively, Nina was actually having sex with Tom from the club, (who could in fact be Thomas, after all, Tom is short for Thomas.)
The world of professional ballet looks nothing like what we see in the movie because it isn't one: it's a ballet school, Thomas is an instructor, and the Swan Queen production is a one-night performance by students. That's why she has a little girl's room, that's why she's only now discovering her sexuality, that's why she's able to land the top spot in a highly competitive ballet despite being timid and meek, that's why her mother coddles her like a child, and that's why she's expected to dance both roles without that being considered overly taxing or potentially harmful: she's probably only fourteen or fifteen years old. Nina imagines her ballet school as a professional company because it is the only thing her mother allows her to do with her life; she doesn't go to school or have friends, and her relationship with Lily is perfectly normal (if extreme) teenage rebellion and experimentation. This would mean that part of the reason why Erica was reluctant to let her daughter go out; she is underage.
Erica is emotionally abusive and manipulative, but she goes to specific pains to control Nina's body: she forcibly clips her fingernails with scissors, scolds her about having perfect skin, uses emotional blackmail to control her diet, constantly invades her privacy, and paints obsessive pictures of her. In the cake scene, Erica goes to throw it out until Nina apologizes, and then only offers her a bit of icing by letting Nina lick it from her finger, almost as an act of supplication. Nina's psyche is already crumbling (the eating disorder, the cutting, and so on) as of the start of the movie because of the years of sexual abuse, which leads her to seek refuge in the only place her mother gives her to be away from her: ballet. She studies ballet under Thomas, who we see in the movie sexually assaults her at least twice.
The reason her mind splits into Odette/Odile is the violation of both herself and what she thought was her pure space, and she's warring with the guilt and shame of being sexually abused, but remaining silent in order to keep her role and the peace in her home, against the pure, untouched perfection she wants to recapture through performing.
With Nina, he saw a girl who was easy to take advantage of, but not experienced nor enthusiastic sexually. In giving her the dual role of the swans, Thomas is killing two birds with one stone: shaping her into a more suitable dancer for the role, and preparing her for his relationship with her. He purposely abuses her verbally and sexually to cause a high-stress level in her, hoping one day she'll snap. He just hadn't intended it to be so soon before he could actually do anything with her.
His motive is to cover his own tracks. It's strongly implied that he seeks out sexual favors in return for giving dancers lead roles. The stress always gets to them, one way or another, and they snap. The authorities are less likely to believe the sexual harassment accusations if they're mixed amongst the ramblings of emotionally unstable suicidals.
- Oh, there's definitely evidence of her being manipulative. Maybe not mean-spirited, but self-serving at least. She sleeps with the director, and shortly gets the alternate role afterwards. It's also implied that she's in some kind of relationship with the male lead dancer, who drops Nina in the first act. And let's not forget her putting a pill in Nina's drink during their night out. And when Nina shows up for the big night, after supposedly being sick, Lily's first response isn't relief, but an angry "What is she doing here? She's supposed to be sick!"
- Its ambiguous as to whether Lily actually slept with Thomas or not, given that Nina hallucinated Thomas turning into a giant crow-like figure. Also, Lily seems disgusted by Thomas, given that she calls him a "prick" and thinks his habit of calling the dancers Little Princesses is "gross". Its unlikely she would sleep with him.
Notice that later, in the privacy Thomas' apartment, he seems completely uninterested in her sexually (aside from some uncomfortable questions) despite having a better opportunity to take advantage of her here, in his own home after they've both been drinking.
Their kiss in the studio during rehearsal was a fantasy spliced in with a scene that otherwise played out normally.
The only time they really kiss is backstage after Nina dances the black swan, her confidence at an all-time high and her recklessness unchecked.
1. Due to the Madonna-Whore Complex trope brought up frequently in the movie, Nina did have sex, but is incredibly ashamed of it, possibly thanks to some Slut-Shaming, either on behalf of her mother, her coworkers, or Nina herself. Or....
2. It wasn't consensual. Nina was either outright raped, or coerced into sex by someone with authority over her. Nina still feels ashamed, despite it not being her fault, and it's possible she never told anyone about it, so most people assume her discomfort with sexuality is solely a result of immaturity and/or being frigid, hence why people think she's a virgin. The perpetrator was likely an instructor or teacher, or maybe even her own mother — hell, it's even possible it was Thomas, which adds another, nastier, darker layer to the scene where he asks if she's a virgin. Considering his frequent sexual assaults towards her, and possibly other dancers, it's not impossible. It's also possible Nina was very young at the time (anywhere from pre-pubescent to a young teen), and couldn't consent, and depending on how young she was, maybe not even understand how sex and consent works. If she never told anyone, she'd probably still have a lot of issues from it. Or maybe she did tell, and that's part of the reason why Erica is so smothering and overprotective.
This explains why Nina represses her sexuality.
Nina's father sexually abused her when she was younger and when Erica found out, she divorced from Nina's father. This is why he is not in Nina and Erica's lives during the movie. While Erica kicked Nina's father out so that Nina wouldn't have to endure incest anymore, she also made Nina swear to never speak of it again and to just "forget it". She never let Nina see a therapist to help her cope with it; this is why Nina's mental health is so fragile now, why she developed an eating disorder, the hallucinations, etc.
It also explains why Erica & Nina's relationship is so cold; deep down, Erica blames Nina for having lost her husband.
When Nina slaps Thomas when he gropes her, that was because she was assaulted before, by her father, and now wasn't letting it happen again. This is why she is the only one of the ballerina's pushing away Thomas' advances (his reaction when she slaps him clearly shows he isn't used to getting rejected, the other girls all probably let him do whatever he wanted sexually).
This also ties in well with the WMG that Lily isn't real. Lily only exists in Nina's mind, and actually is Nina how she would have been if she hadn't been abused and had grown up in a happy family. These two versions of Nina however can't exist at the same time—just like the White and the Black Swan can't co-exist.
